Among the many maladies afflicting the American body politic, and indeed the body politic of any English-speaking nation and others besides, is Feminism. It’s a pestilence that has been around for several generations, though not always under that moniker, and while it was never simply a pure and noble quest to relieve the oppressed, it recently has passed the outermost bounds of reason and veered off into the most astonishing absurdity. Those with sounder minds not yet seduced by whatever it is that Feminism has that attracts so many; those with a cultural pride and desire to salvage of our civilization what may yet be saved; those with a mere drive to see Truth flourish and falsehood exposed are up against it when it comes to Feminism.

Just as an army defending its homeland needs a variety of resources and strategies to vanquish the invading foe, so too do cultural counter insurgents endeavoring to return a modicum of reason and common sense to their national dialogue. Though humans are emotional creatures first and foremost, facts and reasonable interpretations of those facts still matter. It is for this reason that I highly recommend Wendy McElroy’s latest work, Rape Culture Hysteria: Fixing the Damage Done to Men and Women.

The book is a pretty comprehensive and entirely devastating case against the rape hysteria currently incinerating America’s colleges and threatening to break loose into the nation at large. Rape hysteria is a narrative driven by lies and hatred, as one would expect of a hysteria, and Wendy McElroy’s book is designed to take out one of those engines. It won’t end rape hysteria on its own, but it should be an indispensable part of one’s arsenal if one is inclined to engage with Feminists.

If you are like me, you have picked up some facts and studies here and there, from voices on the Internet, which undermine the case for rape hysteria. RCH brings all this information together and fashions from it a solid argument. There is not much in the book that was new to me, but it is wonderful to have it all in one place, and woven into a counter argument.

Perhaps you haven’t heard much about the topic and are curious to find out just what sort of nonsense holds sway in those halls where we send our best and brightest to learn. RCH is a great way to bring yourself up to date.

Or you might even be some wayward Feminist who somehow wound up on my dusty, rarely-used blog. RCH is a great way to save your soul.

The second half of the title is appropriate: Fixing the Damage Done to Men and Women. One cannot attack a sex without hurting the other. How could it be otherwise? Many have noted that since Feminism has gotten its way, women have become less satisfied with their lives than men. To paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi, “Men and women form a symbiont circle. What happens to one of you will affect the other. You must understand this.”

In the interests of not writing a mawkishly fawning piece, I might add a couple small criticisms. The first being that the book gives off the impression of being informed by a strain of thought common to many moderates: that the Women’s Movement was necessary but recently things have just gotten a little crazy. While I acknowledge that there were certain things that needed doing to change our restrictive sex roles, the Women’s Movement largely did them in the wrong way. They tore down fences without bothering to find out why they had been built. And there was a certain alarming, anti-male sentiment from the very beginning.

My only other quibble is that on page 25, in calculating a woman’s chance of sexual assault over four years, she takes the yearly sexual assault rate and multiplies it by four. Granted, she calls it an approximation, but when your approximation has a significant digit in the tenths position – 1 in 52.6 – we might as well just do the math properly. When multiplying together four times the yearly odds of NOT being sexually assaulted, we arrive almost exactly at 1 in 53. It’s not only more accurate, it’s even further from the preposterous 1 in 4 figure thrown around by Feminists, who apparently believe that American college girls are raped as frequently as are women in war torn areas of the Third World. I suppose if you’re willing to believe that women have to work twice as hard has men to earn half as much, but that this is not all that hard for women, you’ll probably believe just about anything.

Quibbles aside – far to the side! – this is a much needed work and Wendy McElroy is devoutly to be thanked by the forces of reason and decency, such as they are in modern America. I highly suggest you push its Amazon ranking a bit higher; I doubt you’ll be disappointed.